Why Your CI Pipeline is a Corporate Séance
Let’s be honest about how software delivery actually works in the wild.
For decades, the enterprise software ritual has followed a comforting, highly choreographed liturgy. You write some code. You sacrifice a chicken to the Jenkins gods. The CI pipeline turns green—a soothing, celestial lime-green glow that whispers sweet nothings into your ear, assuring you that all is right with the universe.
And then you deploy to production, and the server spontaneously combusts into a heap of weeping stack traces, leaving you frantically rummaging through the digital equivalent of a burning attic trying to find last Thursday’s release artifact.
Because here is the dirty little secret that the agile certifiers don’t want you to know: Most pipelines only ask one question: Does the new build work?
It’s a polite, forward-looking question. It’s optimistic. It’s hopelessly naive. In a real-world incident, the question that actually makes your stomach drop into your boots is far more brutal: Can we still run what we had before?
Enter Undo: Necromancy for Cloud Run
That specific brand of existential dread is what birthed Undo—my entry for the GitLab Life After Code / Transcend hackathon over on Devpost.
The premise is delightfully cynical. Instead of blindly trusting that tomorrow’s shiny container image won’t accidentally erase your user database and summon ancient Sumerian demons into your AWS/GCP VPC, Undo implements a strict regime of digital necromancy.
It runs on a simple, ruthless loop:
- Prove: On every push to
main, GitLab CI doesn’t just build the new toy; it resurrects the previous package, forces it to look into the mirror, and hits/health(ROLLBACK_OK) to verify it hasn’t lost its mind. - Ask: If the past is still breathing, an event-driven GitLab Duo flow (no chat-theatre chatbots, just cold, hard automation) triggers automatically on pipeline success, reads the rollback proof, and opens a Work Item.
- Approve: I reply with one word:
approve. (Because even in an age of autonomous silicon agents, a human being should still be the one holding the smoking revolver when production goes sideways). - Promote: A manual
promote_productionjob ships the exact same verified image out to the world.
You can prod the corpse yourself right here: Undo Live Health Check.
Why GitLab and Google Cloud Made the Séance Possible
This wasn’t about building another clever wrapper chatbot that hallucinates python scripts while you sip your flat white. This was about life after code: verification, packaging, release, configuration, and governance.
GitLab became the spine—handling everything from the single .gitlab-ci.yml file to the staging gates and agent session history where judges can peer into the machine’s little mechanical soul.
And Google Cloud? That was the missing proof. A green pipeline on a local laptop is just a comforting delusion. Wiring GitLab CI directly into GCP—service accounts, Cloud Build, Artifact Registry, and Cloud Run—meant the app had somewhere real to land. It stayed tiny and razor-focused on the lifecycle, because when you’re staring down an infrastructure failure, you don’t need a bloated UI; you need to know if the last thing that didn’t break can still boot up.
The Builder’s Post-Mortem
If you’re diving into the next hackathon or trying to drag a legacy enterprise kicking and screaming into supervised autonomy, keep a few hard-earned truths in mind:
- Event-driven flows beat chat demos. Stop chatting with your agents; make them trigger on structural events like pipeline passes and leave an audit trail that won’t disappear when the Slack tab closes.
- “Green” is a polite fiction. A green pipeline does not mean “safe to promote” until you have physically verified that the previous artefact can still answer the phone.
- Keep a human on the tripwire. Agents and CI can handle the heavy lifting in the middle, but a human still owns the final, glorious privilege of pushing the button.
Undo’s rule is simple, brutal, and effective: Don’t treat the next package as ready until the last one still boots—and don’t promote until a human says so.
- Project Repository (GitLab)
- Live Demo /health Endpoint
- Devpost Hackathon Submission
- Watch the Video Walkthrough
